Olympic viewers must have sex on the brain something awful. It could be a side effect from watching all those well-toned, muscular athletes, many of them wearing form-fitting uniforms. Whatever the cause, it didn’t take long for the world to reduce even this noblest of competitions to the level of absolute smut. First, the internet lost its damned collective mind when two German field hockey players named Florian Fuchs and Linus Butt were photographed standing next to each other. Very immature, that. Then, a young American diver from Indiana captured the public’s filthy imagination, just because he happened to be named Steele Johnson, a perfectly innocent moniker that coincidentally sounds like the name of a well-hung, mustachioed porn star from the 1980s. And now, sadly, Johnson’s entire sport has become the subject of salacious snickering. Over at BuzzFeed, staffers Matt Stopera and Lauren Yapalater have assembled a series of screencaps in which various captions, chyrons, and graphics appear directly over the groins of male divers, making the athletes appear nude. It’s really quite distasteful—not the competition itself, but the way that viewers at home can’t keep their minds out of the gutter for a moment.
There’s nothing suggestive whatsoever about this image, for instance. It’s just a young German diver getting himself clean. And that other fellow on the right is clearly wearing a Speedo. This is all on the up and up. There can be no doubt about that.
This photo of a Brazilian diver is perfectly wholesome as well. Never mind what it looks like.
And there is absolutely nothing untoward about this moment from the 2012 games in London. The screenshot does prove, however, that the BBC is just as unlucky as NBC when it comes to producing accidental pornography out of perfectly decent sporting events.
The only saving grace here is that neither Stopera nor Yapalater made an off-color joke about “water sports” in this article. That really would have been beyond the pale. Honestly, when will the world grow up?